3rd Year Photomedia Studio Week 2 & 3 response to presentations.

Notes are Out of sequence and from memory – I haven’t learnt names yet. PS: I sincerely hope I haven’t inadvertently forgotten anyone’s work -i will update next week and if I have take it as a sign of premature ageing : )

Juan Gris and random forces, wide framing worked in first image, melancholy yellow light – breaking technical rules is important because it opens things up. In the frame, a small garden of upside down flowers of decreasing size is depicted. Then we see cadaver portraits drained of colour and yet luminous, then close up of flesh that looked filmic- cyan – David Lynch territory – wormholes between different places where Lynch busts apart spatial distance, as seen in his Inland Empire – dumps the cinematic gloss for a raw aesthetic. Hair behind a backlit sheet… like a black waterfall falling into an abyss. Jacob shows to the class, the black box of a Western digital hard drive that is archiving his culture and at the same time he wages a (fictional) war on certain agencies who would like to arrest his powers of looking and reading and listening.

Then we have thermonuclear information theory through cellular structures of CNN footage on a wall image -next to chaos of white noise – Hillel Schwartz book is mentioned “Making Noise – from babel to the big bang and beyond.” We then discussed entropy and the second law – Artist names the work “Explosions in the sky” and it shows how art can generate, run parallel and be a tool for theory -A’s ? PowerPoint resembles a black wall with dense white text, connecting her approach with the situationists and shows a strong political ethos… Postscripts for the society of Control (see text below) Oh yes, jumping back to presentation, starting with SOPHIE CALLE and the porosity of privacy, social networks – DATA left behind on hard drives would need to be a lifestyle choice within the practice, ….. then we see Times Square as 3d video as stills, how the red / blue shift tears open layers and then when they go back together, it jumps out as an illusion…discussion of sensors, ps2 keyboard controller hack, max MSP software, multiscreen installation.Then we go to the “FAIRFIELD GHETTO” as process art – Harmony Korine – later thinking Larry Clark…silkcreening, attacking the image, wall construction in a room, trippy lighting, cut and paste fragments like a sketchbook writ large ??? later thinking DOGMA CINEMA…realism as collage. We saw highly adept square portraits of older people kissing and then we saw a girl in a bath with her breasts floating in green water. Then 2 images appeared, one of a girl who looked like a model wrapped in newspaper and another in plastic and duct tape – highly stylised not pornographic and then – what is a fetish ? affectation and altered state, the image can hide the truth, is she happy or not about being taped up and wrapped in plastic ? Some people like to wear diapers – this causes visceral reaction in lecturer who says he is ok with that reaction (and still is) this surpises Jacob, but lecturer thinks why should there be a prohibition on instinct – working out the territory – description by ??? of a beautiful horsehead mask that was neccessary for the act of lovemaking to occur.

WEEK 3.There are so many bodies floating and levitating – a women hangs from the doorframe and somehow this is weirdly erotic (to my eye) but in the photo next to it, another person is hiding under a fallen door…was she/he hiding or crushed? These images exude an aura – perhaps because of their technical imperfection re – focus and because they are black and white? In the next sequence we see figures from Charles Ray held to the wall with planks of wood, long haired figures in plain clothes. There is something quasi- religious in these images like some weird theological torture chamber – Christ like figures pushed against a white wall by a plank of wood – a performance art piece done in a shaker compound perhaps? Or great satire of the ‘holy’ power of the art world ?

Going back a week, birds make art on guitar strings – but birds being the animals they are have always been great artists. What became of those birds I wonder? Animals and art who wins -who is better off ? Guitars and art always seem to go well together SEE – MARCO FUSINATO…. I add a link to my dear friends who have OWNED this territory for over twenty years (click here)….Then we see that beautiful image of a late teen floating above city lights…then a fantasy – imagine if the proposition in the photo was that a plane with a cargo of dead girls somehow was losing its cargo – the orientation would be slightly different if she was falling, and then there would be holes ripped in her singlet exposing the pallid flesh and this would be a reason…a reason that we do not get from this image that is absent of a narrative – she is free floating I guess. There is something unlikable about this image for me as a viewer. We must come back to discuss more about this artist in the future, I am sure people would have lots to say about it. Then an image from Magritte at night – the frame is split between day and night this is such a clever division, an art direction challenge for sure…compositing in photoshop, long exposures in the suburbs – doing this on pushbike would be lots of fun.

This essay, which first appeared in L’Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990), is included in the forthcoming translation of Pourparlers(Paris: Editions Minuit, 1990), to be published by Columbia University Press.

“Postscript on the Societies of Control” Gilles Deleuze

1. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ’51could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure–prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors–scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

2. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything–the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest–the flock and each of its animals–but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”) In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society–not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines–levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner–state or private power–but coded figures–deformable and transformable–of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

3. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. F lix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position–licit or illicit–and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation–as they say–but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.